Saturday, January 29, 2011

All the small things

The dawgs are barkin, they're all having fun,
Bernie will lead us to that place in the sun.

With the long list of problems that have afflicted the Browns since their return in 1999, it seems foolish to worry about the future coaching prospects of Bernie Kosar. His reported talks with New England and Cincinnati regarding an as of now unspecified post are such a miniscule thing compared to the importance of this bedraggled organization ensuring that another off-season of wholesale change will be the last for a very long time.

A tiny thing, yes, but that doesn’t stop the Cleveland fan inside me –like so many of its downtrodden brethren keeping a desperate hold on a happier past – from being at least slightly perturbed at the seeming lack of interest for Kosar’s services coming out of Berea.

Now, merely hiring Kosar as a greeter, even a well-paid one, or as some other figurehead position haphazardly created for fan service purposes is not going to do it (See Brown, Jim).

The man is a football savant, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Kosar’s passion for the sport is evident during pre-season TV broadcasts where he calls out the plays before they happen, just as he did under center for so many seasons. Harnessing that nimble offensive mind as a strategist or a scout would only help the Browns in their implementation of a West Coast-style offense.

I would think that my long years of watching the game, complemented by two seasons of intramural flag football and countless hours listening to that Algonquin Round Table better known as local sports talk radio, would qualify me to have at least some say in the hiring practices of a professional football franchise. Apparently not, as this latest version of the Browns coaching staff already has a Bernie-less structure in place, with team president Mike Holmgren ostensibly serving as the team’s offensive consultant.

Still, the possibility of Cleveland’s #1 son, the guy who consciously circumvented league rules to play here, joining forces with Bill “Diminishing Skills” Belichick in New England would just be unwholesome and strange, like flying a kite at night or chewing gum in the shower. It’s just not done!

Furthermore, it would just be so damned…typical of the New Browns penchant for organizational ass-backwardness if this were to transpire. I mean, if the Browns can’t get such a small thing right, how the hell are they going to manage the bigger issue of pulling themselves from their everlasting morass of suck?

The matter is largely one of perception, but there’s a dose of reality here, too. As fans we’ve been eating the sour fruits of this franchise’s incompetence for years. The seeds of these failures may start off small, but we’ve seen how honkingly humongous they can get.

So do the right thing, Browns, and bring back #19. It couldn’t hurt.